The technologists who create it believe they should control it, the people who use it are starting to believe they should control it and the governments who write the laws believe they should control it. And now the priests believe they should also play role.
So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology?
I think there's an interesting phenomenon where it is _not_ the people who control it, but instead a kind of international finance man cum-captain of industry (perhaps best embodied by Sam Altman) who does not create the technology and yet has ended up wielding the levers.
What the hell is a “cum-captain”? Search isn’t helping.
I.e. finance man as well as captain of industry
cum - Used in indicating a thing or person which has two or more roles, functions, or natures, or which has changed from one to another.
Basically nobody uses that language construct anymore until you run headlong into it in a Hackernews comment or something
in commonwealth (seniors in everyday UK, HR and pedants otherwise) usage it rhymes with dumb, like you'd expect
Radcliff-cum-Chackmore
It's also a slang word for semen, but that's not relevant here.
Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem.
Now AI (set loose in the wild at the AI industry's strategic choice so as to be irreversible) seems poised to disrupt and render a very significant part of the labor force disrupted on an unprecedented societal scale and it appears to be a foregone conclusion that collateral damages won't be the causal industry's expense. Nevermind that its also poised to easily afford those social costs, and don't even consider that maybe society should be considering this obvious cause and effect. For me at least the feudal suppression of this otherwise obvious and necessary discussion is perhaps more spectacular than the causal technological breakthrough itself.
Now *that's* control.
Why is this Uber's problem? Do you realize how ridiculously dumb, inefficient, and corrupt a 6 figure taxi license is? It is not Uber's job to compensate for that ridiculousness.
They provided a better and more cash efficient solution for passengers. That is enough.
If you required every technological venture to cover the cost for every person it "disrupts," you would halt progress entirely.
They burned half a billion dollars a month of VC money at their peak to undercut taxis across the world; in quainter times this used to be called "dumping", now it's just the standard way of doing business. All the while basically flaunting the law with their whole "we're just a platform connecting people who happen to drive a car with people who happen to want to go some place, it's totally not a taxi guys". No regulations, no expensive licenses or professional certifications, no need even for a minimum wage or basic social security or insurance or any kind of protection. Amazing!
Essentially the same in spirit as Airbnb, only this latter had far more destructive consequences than screwing over taxi drivers.
Uber did a great thing here and made a product that people like more, for less money. More drivers, way more global availability, more customers, and better cars, all while being cheaper. That is a quintessential success story.
If people liked taxis more, they'd use them. But taxis are still shit and the only reason we use them is because of the taxi cartel bullying weak city governments into restricting Ubers.
Changing peoples behaviors >cost money<. Using your number here, taxis had a 25% value prop. That was just the cost of getting people to change.
I don’t care for Uber, but many many many businesses give people initial discounts and then full price later
The whole argument is moot though given self driving cars are going to wipe out the industry.
I agree that dumping is generally bad, and perhaps laws against it should have been enforced against Uber. But the taxi system deserved to be destroyed. They sucked, and there was really no political/business way out of that system other than someone violating regulations on "what is a taxi" until it stuck. I'm not a "means justify the ends" guy in general, but in this case I think it worked out how it should have.
Setting aside your implicit assumption that what nigh-unregulated AI is set to do to humanity is "progress," having a sound argument is pretty pointless if it leads to tremendous human suffering.
Reminds me of the paradox of intolerance, where bad faith actors say "it's intolerant to be intolerant of intolerance" (i.e., argue for zero exceptions to a maxim) when it's much more preferable to say "you should be tolerant, except in the case where tolerance leads to tremendous suffering [as in the case of allowing the rise of fascism because you have to be tolerant of it]."
See also libertarianism, where simple rules are preferable to good outcomes.
The first example is clear. And it has pretty much carried on, as the "right to property" and "the responsibility to cover damage to other's rights".
The second example, even though you wrote it as Uber vs. the cab driver, is more about Uber vs. the municipality. By the fact that almost all over the world people wanted Uber (or the other brands) over the imposed limitation of their municipalities, shows that the deal was wrong. In places where it was artificially limited, people have showed to prefer the alternatives. It has little to do with Bob the driver, and more to do with Alice the mayor who decided unilaterally that a taxi cab should require a 100k/yr medallion. That's what's changed, and society accepted it.
The third example is weirder still. Again you pose it as AI provider vs. average Joe, but here I struggle to even see what rights / who's rights are being infringed upon. I don't see any. While we generally have a right to work, there is absolutely no right to work in a certain industry, if the industry doesn't have demand. If someone else doesn't need your output, your right to work in that particular field has absolutely no basis in reality.
Unless you want to go back to the places and regimes that decided who works where, modern society has no place for such thinking. A right to work protects you from employers choosing not to hire you because of things that you are (race, age, gender, etc.) It absolutely doesn't protect you at all against "people don't need elevator operators anymore". And I say this as someone who's worked in this industry 20+ years. If tomorrow people don't need software done by hand anymore, tough luck for me. But it's absolutely not the problem of rights. I don't have a right to demand people wanting my services. That's not the social contract at all.
The argument was "governments restricted taxi availability so Uber won" and now you've mott-and-bailied yourself down to "people want to pick music they listen to on the ride"
No it doesn't. It shows they could undercut the market, monopolise it, and then charge more once they'd killed the competition.
so the people vs. otis, the people vs. IBM608, and so on? Has it ever worked?
So if you’re a business offering poor quality services, and I come along and start offering higher quality services, I owe you damages for the impact I have on your business?
The whole encyclical's argument is that morality requires an accounting and response to the pain inflicted upon each individual, and human morality is a distinct set of rules and norms than economic, physical, or even civil laws. I think it also follows that it's not just, e.g., Walmart or OpenAI who bares some responsibility for ameliorating temporary suffering. And to the extent people use the encyclical as fodder in the usual anti-corporate rhetoric, then that's unfortunate.
And this is coming from the Catholic church. It turns alot of people off who in isolated contexts often perceive hypocrisy, but in its charity it has always considered the personal responsibility of those receiving it. It understands the struggles and inherent tensions that comes from trying to square individualized justice & mercy, selflessness, and the "greater good".
This was really just a few cities in the US. There's no artificial taxi scarcity in Houston or London or Tokyo.
You might reflexively say London has strict regulations, but it regulates safety not imposing an artificial cap. That's a NY/Boston/Chicago/Philly thing.
Uber won because:
1. on-demand app
2. VCs subsidized rides to destroy taxi companies by driving the customer cost to well below provider cost.
Not sure about other regions but in NYC this is 100% the case. Ubers used to be nicer cleaner newer cars, better drivers.. for less than a taxi. Now they are about 4x what they cost in the 2010s, with cars about as dirty as a taxi and equally surly drivers.
Uber/Taxi discussion is so transparently centered around New York City, it makes all discussions irrelevant to most of the US.
In fact, I still use a taxi to go to the airport with my family instead of taking an Uber. Uber is for being mid-run in city limits trails and running out of energy in the heat and the water fountains have stopped working due to low water pressure. Uber gets me to safety, and I tip big because I just sweated all over their car.
Same for Uber/Lyft, but they really tried to earn a good review while still providing a pretty unpleasant experience.
You can be both a victim and a bully, it's not mutually exclusive. A scam artist can get mugged or burglarised, and so on. In general, in civilised countries, being a horrible person does not prevent someone from being recognised as a victim.
I learn that boiling the stream water makes it safe and tell people about it.
What do I owe you?
Uber and AI are certainly more complicated than that, but you are pretty close to arguing that the constructed rights of some people inhibit the rights of other people.
There's a big political problem to solve, but it's how to give most people decent material standards of living if computers are doing all the work, not how to freeze things in place so that people can keep doing tasks that (assuming success) the computer is better at.
The goal of AI companies is to replace workers entirely; that is the only way their valuations make sense, and OpenAI's charter says this explicitly.
Okay, edits it is. The displacement will rather obviously be incremental and be task by task, not job by job.
Doesn't it strike you that if licenses for a banal service like taxi are that expensive, that this likely indicates political corruption?
Good riddance to this sort of rent-seeking. I wonder if the NYC taxi service was provided by the mob.
In Central Europe, I don't have to wonder. Prior to Uber, the local taxi services were operated by the mob, and the taxi drivers basically robbed naive tourists through exorbitant, illegal prices. Stories of rape or abuse of intoxicated women abound. Some of the drivers were so sketchy and creepy that people refused to board their cars. Scammy Prague taxi service was legendary, but by far the worst sort of tracksuit-and-gun wearing mobsters behind the wheel I ever encountered was in late 1990s Bratislava.
This ugly rotten web was swept clean by Uber, where people have a reputation to maintain. Thanks god. My wife is no longer afraid to take a cab at night. Hooray.
Not necessarily. It indicates a profession that can be very easily abused to harm the general public and that requires some level of trust.
Most professions can be abused to harm people and require some level of trust. Imagine that a developer's medailon cost 300 k.
I agree with you that it requires scrutiny and the process must be open and fair, like most things in a working democracy. I also think that it is not out of line to have mechanisms to ensure whoever is in a situation to kill, mug, kidnap or ransom you has no interest in doing so.
The problem in practice seems that those mechanisms get hijacked by the very people whom they should prevent from being in that service.
IDK about NYC, but here in Central Europe, taxi services regulated by municipal governments were consistently treating their customers worse than Uber/Bolt. Outright murders were rare, but sexual harassment, fraud, verbal abuse, even "minor" things like the cars smelling of tobacco smoke were worse. Occassionally, there were cars set on fire or brandishing of weapons when those drivers got into conflicts. That's not ancient history and people still remember.
That happens when guys with deep pockets capture the regulatory services and make them into their own cash cow, using force of law to prevent any competition from emerging.
If you had a ballot about canceling Uber and going back to the old model here, that would lose by something like 15:85. The improvement in service and safety is just staggering.
Ok.
> Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem.
And how does this paragraph connect to the previous one? The streets of New York isn't taxi drivers' private property. No one trampled their garden any more than me opening a coffee shop tramples the garden of the Starbucks down the street. Should we forbid any new entry into a market just because it upsets the incumbents who invested big money into their business?
is it ok if I skip the Uber part? I think that leads as try s evidenced by the other reactions.
the "who is liable for the damage an ai creates, in the hands of an incompetent or even malignant guide?" question is fantastic. and who "owns" an ai?
It’s weird to see the completely broken NY taxi cab medallion system brought up as a good thing.
Most taxi drivers didn’t own a medallion. They had to rent one from one of the operations that had bought them up. It was a government granted monopoly in the control of companies that charged the drivers for the right to be able to work.
The price was high partially because the supply was artificially limited, which made getting a cab bad for people of the city.
People like to criticize Uber but let’s not glorify the past system. It sucked. The Uber model that let anyone work without having to surrender their pay to some company hoarding the tokens was great for drivers and for people of the city.
Uber and friends have indeed democratised giving rides to people - though where I am, a few rich people have bought numerous cars and have daily wagers driving them finding fares via Uber - but at the cost of far more cabs on the road.
Others, notably motorbikes and scooter ride aggregators have emerged to replicate Uber. These motorbike cabs are even harder to regulate than cabs.
Uber, imo, has broken the equilibrium that existed before.
Uber has absolutely increased traffic levels in the places where they operate. I don't personally think it's to a level that is actually a problem, but I also avoid driving myself around in cities whenever I can, so I may not be the best at observing this.
You used driving as an example. I don't see how it's better for the city if we encourage more people to own and park cars because taking taxis is too hard.
The nice thing about Uber is that it lets those cars used for personal driving double as taxis when demand is high. Instead of having your own car and parking it, you can have someone else use their car to drive you.
I think some people have become so desperate to make Uber evil that we're intentionally ignoring what's gained.
Finally, regulating taxi medallions is an awful way to address traffic. If traffic is the problem, you regulate vehicles and traffic. Creating a system where you have to buy something approaching the price of a house just to do a job with a low hourly rate because the city wants to regulate traffic is beyond broken.
I think it goes deeper than this when you listen to them talk. They truly think society will be re-ordered by this technology... and they should be in control of that re-ordering rather than democratically elected governments.
We even had one out tariffs on steel, thinkinf this would be good for jobs here. If there was 0.1 seconds of thought they'd realize any manufacturing job you make from a steel tariff cuts 2 more well paid trade jobs
They knew that was the case. They don't care. The maga crowd isn't acting in good faith. Nobody other than the cult members and people who aren't paying attention thought that would actually bring manufacturing back to the US. The point of the tariffs is to devalue USD (something Trump wants to do since circa the 80s) and to strengthen Trump power/influence. He wants everybody in the world to be forced to come and negotiate directly with him so he can see them bend their knees. The whole thing is a power play
By increasing tariffs they will have to pay their proper obeisance for their inferiority, and be inspired to actually work hard like us Americans.
I draft and write some code for construction companies and personally saw layoffs and not taking work due to increased material costs. The structural companies we worked with similarly did a few layoffs. The average pay of these jobs was 60k+.
Manufacturing of steel is very competitive and I haven't seen the American steel drop in price. I can't personally imagine it adding more than a few thousand jobs since it's so competitive (thin margins) and you would have to add a ton of production to add one job.
Meanwhile, the profitability of building a building is a direct feed into whether buildings get built. A building not being built directly led to laying off about 100 field guys for us.
You just make less of them. Some buildings are discretionary, like your big apartment buildings you probably want (these were the two that got cancelled).
Person funding can make x profit over building per year. Person loaning loans x for y sum. Building costing more than interest amortized profit means it doesn't get built.
And I just had a doctor's office fitout cancelled mid project (drafted it personally :) ). so apparently those are, too.
Public projects like schools rarely get cancelled. Factories I personally don't draft so I really can't tell you.
Healthcare absolutely has a ton of discretion for their buildouts.
What's the alternative to steel? You just make less if it's not profitable to make.
If the stated goal is jobs, the tariffs aren't doing it from what I can tell.
It seems to be hands have been put on the scales, and to call cancelling the building that would have otherwise been built due to market forces good needs some testing. If it were doctors offices in already served areas, sure, but these were not subsidized but lower end apartment buildings in NYC. I'm hoping the guys who were laid off moved to some other company rather than exiting the trade.
And we are very competitive in machines, already set up to win.
It’s also fantasy that even 4 years of tariffs will convince anyone to build brand-new smelting operations, as they’re very large, capital intensive, take a while to build. And again, mostly worse jobs.
This is the part everyone seems to forget. Any "new" jobs would be shitty low paying jobs, and it would mostly instead need to be automation.
Tariffs transfer wealth to the 1% and leave shit jobs that pollute the environment, which also happen to raise the cost of all goods, for everyone else.
A technocracy can build high speed rail in a decade but it can also institute multi decade one child policy, multi year zero-covid, barricade people into their own homes and ban entire industries at the whim of a single leader. There is less course correction.
I guess I kinda walked right into handing technocrats power, but I really just want the government to understand the tech they regulate. We'd rather have populist zingers on TV though.
Trade policy should be as holistic as possible (tariffs, taxes, subsidies, etc), with the goal of aiding a robust domestic economy.
The 70's neoliberalism took Smith's comparative advantage argument and stripped it of context — optimizing for quarterly returns and capital mobility while ignoring the industrial ecosystem those returns depend on. You can't offshore your entire manufacturing base and expect to retain the innovation, workforce capacity, and supply chain resilience that made those profits possible in the first place.
Contrast this with "For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country."
That era was not without its issues as well, but there was a sense that "we're all in it together" vs the "greed is good" crowd.
This needs to be shouted from the rooftops!
All the Web3 edgelords talk about how democracy is inefficient and how their magic blockchains will fix things but don't actually back up their claims with anything.
Sure, it could be applied and might work, but the only thing blockchain brings is a distributed immutable ledger -- but all the trust actions happen outside that ledger. And that's not what slows us down, it's the people, ideas, power and process that makes it inefficient.
Money is a hell of a drug.
Look at the state of discussion just in this thread. I minimized my contribution for this reason.
The purpose of our society is for people. It's not a lever for the powerful to centralize control. Those who attempt to do so always have evil as their motive.
This is starting to be true for AI and security bugs. Writing secure Internet-facing software will depend on AI security review. Anthropic can hold Mythos back for a while to buy some time, but the competition isn’t going to stop.
It’s also not always true that technologists think they should control AI. Some companies support legislation. But there’s not a lot of progress, so they end up making their own decisions in the meantime.
This strategy would also have the advantage that experts with skin in the game of their field and cutting edge experience get to choose, hone, and debate the policies before testing them so that out-of-touch elected officials don't have to do that step which would be parsecs out of their competence.
Unfortunately that would be a strategy that a real member of the real world might come up with to improve their product, their industry, their ability to create, and their relationship with the consumer. Instead we have nothing but parasites optimizing for gaming the quarterly numbers to pump and dump national institutions and building blackmail profiles against other powerful players to out-extort them while everyone involved tries to maximize how much blood they can suck.
There's a quote I will mangle and I forget the source of that's something like "If you agree with all the positions of your chosen political party, either you have thought through every option and came to the same conclusions on dozens of topics, or you haven't thought through anything".
> because for ~50% of the population it's become a team sport / religion situation
It's kinda even worse. We can only have two parties because of FPTP, and turnout is about 60% of voting-eligible population on average. We know from recent popular vote that that 60% is split roughly 50-50.
So 30% of the voting population is Team Blue Hat, and 30% is Team Red Hat.
If you can get 15.1% of the population to vote for an unserious clown, they'll win their respective party's nomination. And in most states, one of the parties is a pretty sure lock in the general.
15% is a pretty low bar. Compare: Up to 30% of people think "chemtrails" are at least a "somewhat" real thing, and 5% of people believe vaccines contain microchips. So the bar for getting a guaranteed win is somewhere between those two wacky and easily disproven beliefs.
https://www.cnn.com/us/chemtrails-conspiracy-theory-explaine...
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/nearly-half-americans-still-uns...
Political power has always about who controls economic production, and the tools of economic production.
It should be put in the hands of the most trustworthy, transparent institution that can validate it works for all of us, not just the few.
I don't think private companies or specific leaders want the best for the common good, so it would make the most sense to give control to a supra-nation entity like the UN - at least that would be the most democratic as we all have the chance to influence it (via voting from national to international level).
We are in this constant cycle of bubbles — the last ones I can recall bursting in 2000 and 2008 — where someone invents some new financial shell game that allows them to trade on some form of non-existent capital and then half the stock market follows along like rats after the piper until it all collapses as soon as enough people realize that everyone else also realizes the Emperor is wearing no clothes. And incidentally no, I have no idea how this particular trainwreck of fairy tail lessons all became pertinent simultaneously, but here we are.
Control over things makes a lousy incentive anyway, since having said control always better empowers the appointed to just cheat the incentive instead.
If the big bad wolf is at your door, "letting him in" isn't a bargaining chip you can trust to incentivize any sort of behavior other than "eating you".
But I also feel that it has been a particularly toothless organization. If a member state decides it is in their interest to flout some safeguard they were to mandate, that state will do so, and the U.N. won’t do anything about it unless there’s broad agreement between the US, China, and probably Russia. And the chances are that whoever is in need of enforcement is one of those, or a closely allied country of one.
This is a very naive and idealistic imagining of what international NGOs such as the UN are actually like and how they operate. I can't think of anything worse.
The median country is a corrupt authoritarian state.
I hope so. Recent turns of events notwithstanding, I remain optimistic about democracy in the long run. I think it's going to get harder to say with a straight face that the private sector can really manage vital institutions better than government.
Recent reports about commencement speeches at college graduations suggest that within the span of a just a few years, computer programmers no believe that they are riding on the coattails of the technology oligarchs. Besides, nobody wears coats with tails any more.
We we go there in one easy step? I'm not that optimistic.
Silicon valley owns the internet. The robber barons owned the railways. Big oil. Big pharma. The investment company owned the (slave) trading fleets. The lords owned the agriculture. The clergy owned the books. The Kings owned the armies.
Technology accumulates capital, capital accumulates technology.
In Russian, there's a saying: He who feeds a girl is the one to dance her.
In this case, the food is the money printed out of thin air.
FFS. Morals come from somewhere. For many, that's religion. Deal with it.
Dark times ahead...
My point remains: they can control it if they can control it. Because right now they can't even take responsibility for it.
Imagine if every time you booked an uber it was like "your drive may crash the car". Or whenever you ate at a restaurant, the waiter said "there is a chance the chef will poison you". Or your bank statement said something like "these numbers may be wrong".
Isn't that just an instance of the political problem for all ages: who controls what, who gets to rule and who obeys, the fundamental power struggle apparent in all human history.
Extend the definition of technology to the broadest sense, from the material that allow us control over the physical reality: steam, computing; to the organizational, that enable collective human action: states, factories and assembly lines; and the ideological, that legitimize certain power arrangements: religion, nationalism, democracy, human rights etc.
A feudal lord's power rested on land (material), the manorial system (organizational), and the divine right of kings or religious sanction (ideological). Even if peasant revolts happen from time to time, the arrangement is stable because the peasantry accept it as legitimate and have no economic alternative; so even when revolting they cannot imagine a different political order. Technological (broad) leaps like the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution change the political possibility space so arrangements like feudalism are no longer stable, but others like capitalism, liberal democracy etc. become possible.
Political actors observe these technological shifts and struggle for control, relevance and power. The old elites are contested by the new kids on the block, wielding the new technologies: the aristocrat by the bourgeois, pastoralist tribes by agricultural states, autocrats stuck with traditional propaganda by the kids with smartphones and social media.
The present struggle around AI is therefore to be expected; what's more interesting is the type of political possibility space it opens up: is it one where having the bulk of society educated and productive, capable of running the machines is the key factor pushing the country forward in the international technological competition, like we've see post-war, forcing the national elites to cater to their needs, invest in their populations and broadly share the economic output and the political power? Or is it more likely one where the key competitive factor is the size of your datacenters and automated defense factories, where the bulk of people are irrelevant for the architecture of power?
Because if it's the latter, the entire idea that democracy will somehow manage to survive and influence who gets what becomes problematic. In the new technological-historical space, democracy becomes structurally unfavorable and thus, unlikely to persist long term.
Yes. But modern technology, especially software doesn't have the high barrier to entry like being a feudal lord, but successful software can be just as impactful, tie in economies of scale and network effects and it can be even more powerful, which has allowed the producers of such software to wield significant power and as a result bypass democracy. And this ties in with your point:
> The present struggle around AI is therefore to be expected; what's more interesting is the type of political possibility space it opens up: is it one where having the bulk of society educated and productive, capable of running the machines is the key factor pushing the country forward in the international technological competition, like we've see post-war, forcing the national elites to cater to their needs, invest in their populations and broadly share the economic output and the political power? Or is it more likely one where the key competitive factor is the size of your datacenters and automated defense factories, where the bulk of people are irrelevant for the architecture of power?
It remains to be seen if this era of LLMs and datacenters raises or reduces the barrier to entry for software production and in general technological innovation. The marketplace is always hungry for innovation and those that can deliver and control it will be in a position of power.
But it's a perennial question, really, and it won't go away any time soon.
Mitigating seemingly has devolved to trade wars and protectionism.
The genie is out the bottle with AI though. So perhaps decentralisation of it puts us all on a new level playing field.
A better solution would be to just not have AI at all, outside of the few research roles where LLMs actually make sense.
More to the point it's trained on copyrighted material, so why entertain any use at all on that front if anything.
If it's trained on the world's information, give the world the model.
It doesn't need a tech company to pilfer everything and charge X if we're going to ignore the IP.
The models free to download aren't the models used by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. You aren't going to get all of OpenAI downloaded to your desktop and running fully on just your hardware.
And in each case (search and AI) the potential to decentralize and maintain "usable quality" is limited by these technologies requiring physical infrastructure at a scale that isn't available to the home consumer.
They aren't as good as the full fat models but they're plenty useful for many real world tasks. Show me the open source web search engine that I can run locally and that's plenty useful for many real world tasks!